User:Coffee2theorems

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	I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
	— Michel de Montaigne

This is more concise than Wikipedia:Etiquette, but elaborates on meta:Don't be a dick.

"Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding." — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away." — Dinah Craik
"When we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken and that he only failed to see all sides." — Attributed to Blaise Pascal
"Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he could be, and he will become what he should be." — Anonymous
"He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass." — Attributed to George Herbert

"What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." — Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them." — Attributed to John Ruskin
Avoid in Wikiverse: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." — John Muir

When one becomes sufficiently attached to a point of view, it is easy to do more harm than good to its reputation and to oneself.

"A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world." — Attributed to Tony Benn
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." — Carl Sagan
"Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason." — Attributed to Jerry Seinfeld

What's the point in making a free encyclopedia without getting paid, anyway? Idealism and pragmatism, I guess — not necessarily in that order.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." — Jimmy Wales
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation." — Thomas Jefferson

"I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race." — Bertrand Russell
"Cynicism isn't smarter, it's only safer. There's nothing fluffy about optimism." — Jewel
"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did." — T. E. Lawrence

	One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings.
	— Anonymous